We hit Zen Studio in St Peters early in June 2008 – only a stone’s throw away from my beloved King Street to start the new album sessions. We had the idea that the songs we’d collected and written would form a kind of a concept album containing songs that were film soundtracks, should have been soundtracks or could still become soundtrack music. Along with new original songs, the album would contain covers of well known film soundtracks mashed with more obscure songs and covers of songs with a strong filmic sense that I’d picked up on my travels
around the globe. We even covered two of my own hits: Big Country and The Texan Thing, reinterpreting them as film soundtrack music. There are also new original spaghetti western and surf instrumentals.
In the first sessions we recorded 8 tracks and took them to the flat mix stage. We returned in November with Smithy, our new bass player, and recorded six more and rerecorded the track Motel Satellite.
We’d book a weekend session at the start of each of these two recording phases and go in with the whole band and try to get some bed tracks with great feels. Getting the drums and bass down was the priority. Peter Timmerman who’d played with me in the original line-up of Love Gone Wrong was able to give the songs a rock solid base with a good groove. The vocal and all the other instruments would be overdubbed later in subsequent weeks in evening sessions attended by just Jeff or myself. Jeff did some sessions working up tracks with layers of guitars, dobro, pedal steel and lap steel. Jeff’s playing gave the songs a stronger roots flavour than the band’s last release. I’d usually wait until the backing track was complete before recording the final vocal takes.
Motel Satellite was written by a guy from San Francisco called Pat Johnson who I’d met in Berlin in the ‘90’s. It’s a long brooding, romantic song that I’d been wanting to cover for a long time. We’d tried it out as a semi acoustic track in the first sessions in June but we couldn’t catch the spirit the song needed. We revisited it in the November sessions doing it as a full band with much improved results. The song was still looking for an extra texture. We’d had a Johnny Gauci come in to play some Hammond on the song in the early sessions and I thought I’d test Geoff Lee’s engineering skills by asking him to “fly” the organ part from the semi acoustic version into the new band version. Now the two versions were in the same key but there was no way that they would be in the same tempo. But with the bag of tricks that is Pro-tools, Geoff was able to massage the organ track into the new recording. The result in my own modest opinion is one of the best recordings I’ve made in my music career.
The title song, Is This Not Paris? also developed a life of its own. It started out as a kind of Australian Ballad of John and Yoko. But the inclusion of Megan Heyward on guest vocals helped transport Johnny Cash and June Carter’s Jackson to Newtown, Sydney via London and Paris. – wherever the bus routes meet, John Kennedy is there.
You could have said we had a shoelace budget but then we didn’t even have a shoelace. By late January 2009, the global economic crisis was hitting even indie bands like us and we had to wrap up the sessions before our meagre finances ran out.
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Is This Not Paris? CD: Part 2 -The recording
We hit Zen Studio in St Peters early in June 2008 – only a stone’s throw away from my beloved King Street to start the new album sessions. We had the idea that the songs we’d collected and written would form a kind of a concept album containing songs that were film soundtracks, should have been soundtracks or could still become soundtrack music. Along with new original songs, the album would contain covers of well known film soundtracks mashed with more obscure songs and covers of songs with a strong filmic sense that I’d picked up on my travels
around the globe. We even covered two of my own hits: Big Country and The Texan Thing, reinterpreting them as film soundtrack music. There are also new original spaghetti western and surf instrumentals.
In the first sessions we recorded 8 tracks and took them to the flat mix stage. We returned in November with Smithy, our new bass player, and recorded six more and rerecorded the track Motel Satellite.
We’d book a weekend session at the start of each of these two recording phases and go in with the whole band and try to get some bed tracks with great feels. Getting the drums and bass down was the priority. Peter Timmerman who’d played with me in the original line-up of Love Gone Wrong was able to give the songs a rock solid base with a good groove. The vocal and all the other instruments would be overdubbed later in subsequent weeks in evening sessions attended by just Jeff or myself. Jeff did some sessions working up tracks with layers of guitars, dobro, pedal steel and lap steel. Jeff’s playing gave the songs a stronger roots flavour than the band’s last release. I’d usually wait until the backing track was complete before recording the final vocal takes.
Motel Satellite was written by a guy from San Francisco called Pat Johnson who I’d met in Berlin in the ‘90’s. It’s a long brooding, romantic song that I’d been wanting to cover for a long time. We’d tried it out as a semi acoustic track in the first sessions in June but we couldn’t catch the spirit the song needed. We revisited it in the November sessions doing it as a full band with much improved results. The song was still looking for an extra texture. We’d had a Johnny Gauci come in to play some Hammond on the song in the early sessions and I thought I’d test Geoff Lee’s engineering skills by asking him to “fly” the organ part from the semi acoustic version into the new band version. Now the two versions were in the same key but there was no way that they would be in the same tempo. But with the bag of tricks that is Pro-tools, Geoff was able to massage the organ track into the new recording. The result in my own modest opinion is one of the best recordings I’ve made in my music career.
The title song, Is This Not Paris? also developed a life of its own. It started out as a kind of Australian Ballad of John and Yoko. But the inclusion of Megan Heyward on guest vocals helped transport Johnny Cash and June Carter’s Jackson to Newtown, Sydney via London and Paris. – wherever the bus routes meet, John Kennedy is there.
You could have said we had a shoelace budget but then we didn’t even have a shoelace. By late January 2009, the global economic crisis was hitting even indie bands like us and we had to wrap up the sessions before our meagre finances ran out.